OK Greg, here are some answers………

RAM FANNING is the opposite of FANNING. RAM FANNING is when the the draw hand literally “rams” the gun forward into the stationary fanning hand to ram and fire. The draw hand is the initiator…… FANNING is when the draw hand moves the gun in an upward (not forward @ all) position and the fanning hand moves back into the gun to fan and fire. The fanning hand is the initiator………. It should be obvious to anyone that the excessive gun thrust and movement of the barrel in ram fanning renders it useless and really should not be classified as a draw technique period! It is that bad and unfortunately, is a method used by many a shooter. You can tell that just by looking @ the 15′ wax scores @ a match (accuracy event)…. FANNING is a correct and refined movement involving perfect timing of the fanning hand engaging the upward draw of the gun.

SLAP COCKING is the opposite as UP-FANNING. Slap cocking is when the fanning hand (actually fanning fingers, as the palm of the hand should not come in contact with the hammer, the fingers are the magic, more later) starts the “draw” by fanning (slapping) the hammer back while still in the holster, then firing by squeezing the trigger of course, when on target………..UP_FANNING as mentioned previously, is the gun being drawn up and the fanning hand firing the gun as it is moving in an upward motion……. FANNING is when the gun is drawn and positioned (precisely and “just in time” locked in) before the fanning hand fires the gun.
Fanning is covered by the above 3 techinques.

Thumbing has 2 basic techniques. The old “original” method of PALM THUMBING is when the draw hand (and only hand involved of course) starts from a distance and actually charges into the gun and methodically cocks the hammer back while simultaneously drawing the gun and squeezing the trigger and eventually firing when gun is on target….. This was the only way to thumb because of the original 6″ hand clearance rule that was the standard for early day fast draw……… The rule change from the 6″ standard to the current “obvious hand clearance” rule created a new method called SQUEEZE THUMBING. SQUEEZE THUMBING is positioning the draw hand very close to the gun in a “sort of cocked hand /wrist position. The gun is drawn and fired by the squeezing of the thumb on top and the 4 fingers on bottom, again timing is critical but when done correctly, is the most efficient, positive, (meaning no haunting half-cocks experienced by all the old way) accurate and fastest way to thumb.

In reference to which techniques yield the fastest times……..in generic terms…….open style TWIST FANNING is the fastest, then SLAP COCKING, then FANNING, then SQUEEZE THUMBING, then PALM THUMBING, then finally, well…….. RAM FANNING is last.

Just a few more comments for now.

SLAP COCKING is the most popular technique used. There are two basic reasons why. The main one is accuracy. The theory is, the initial impact of the gun is done prior to the draw, then the draw hand simply has to pull the trigger on target……..(of course this is why Mr. Ron Phillips is the best accuracy shooter ever is a fanner, so much for the theory, but it is true for most). It also is easier to slap-cock the hammer back when it is holstered upright when using a speed over the boot draw……. Fanning, the impact is @ the critical firing time, accurately impossible for most, but not for Ronnie, and also is tough to “reach” and successfully fan-cock the hammer back during a speed draw because the gun has been drawn over the boot which positions the hammer waaaaay back and well,,,,,, enough said. Only God can hit hit a 1 iron and only God can successfully fan the hammer back there.

I personally TWIST FANNED all through the open years of fast draw, successfully as the records indicate, because open was the standard. Traditional is now the standard of which I FAN MY INDEX DOUBLES, and SLAP COCK everything else.

Gary Tryon holds his annual match to start the SHOOTING year off in ARIZONA, which is an OPEN contest. I will TWIST FAN a 23.5 average on ALL STANDING BALLOONS, SLAP COCK a 32.0 average on ALL STANDING WAX EVENTS. ……….In the THUMBING CONTEST prior to the OPEN, I will SQUEEZE THUMB a 31.5 average in ALL BALLON EVENTS and a 32.5 average in ALL WAX EVENTS…………then I will wake up in the morning before the match depressed realizing it was a dream………… and try to make it come true!

In summation Greg, now that you understand everything, slap cock your way to index/accuracy fame, fan your way to speed/accuracy fame, thumb your way to all around shooter fame, then you will have “ARRIVED”!

Good night.
Ernie Hill

Ernie Hill was the Founder and President of Ernie Hill International. His innovative holster designs were used by many of the top competitiors in IPSC, Fast Draw and Cowboy Action shooting in the 80′s and 90′s. His presence in the sport of Fast Draw is missed by those who knew him and those who have had the opportunity to shoot out of one of his fine rigs.

It is foolish to think you can take any single action gun, regardless of make, in its production-line condition, and attain any kind of real speed, or without getting a torn thumb from its sharp edges. Do you think any of the top target shooters in the U. S. are using production line guns? Well, possibly a few, but if so it is only because the manufacturers of target guns have recognized the needs of competitive target shooting. Has any company done like-wise for the Fast Draw boys? We must have special guns, finely tuned for our sport. Crosman Arms Company has done a lot in this direction with their low-cost Hahn 45 and their CO2 Single Action Six. So has Ruger, with the positive action of their Single-Six. But even these fine guns can be improved for fast draw speed and fast draw safety. And for this improvement, each fast draw sportsman must be his own gunsmith. He must sweat it out over the work bench.

S-o-o, Cowpokes, hand and rattle. Here’s a few timely tips on “Tuning for Time.”

Let’s start with the Hahn 45. Strange as it seems, this low-cost gun requires only a little effort to make it a real rootin’-tootin’, fast, rugged piece of equipment.

Don’t get nervous; this is easy. Grab the Hahn 45 in your grubby little mitt and hold it up to the light. Cock the hammer a few times and release it slowly. What do you see just back of the cylinder? You see a little round bearing ball jumping in and out of a hole like a “Jack-in-the-Box.” There’s your gremlin, my fast draw friend. Back of that ball bearing is a coil spring. When the hammer is cocked the ball bearing has to compress this spring to ride from one cylinder positioning hole to another. The hard spot in the action occurs when the ball bearing starts to ride out of the positioning hole.

Now we are ready to dismantle. And here’s a tip: make sure all the gas is expelled from the powerlet by depressing the trigger and pushing forward on the hammer with the ball of the thumb. If this isn’t done, the powerlet will take off like a Nike. It doesn’t even need a launching pad.

First remove the grips. Now, what’s the handiest thing on the workbench? An ashtray? Right! Lay the Hahn across the ashtray so that the cylinder of the gun is suspended. Remove the screw just above and in front of the trigger guard. Next, remove the hammer screw. Take the screw removed first, and insert it in the back side of the frame where the hammer screw was removed. This keeps the hammer in place when the gun is disassembled. Remove the other two screws and lift off the top half of the frame.

Whoops! We’ve lost the main spring. Nope, here it is, in the part we just lifted off. Pick it up and take a look. You will notice at one end of the spring a shiny spot where the hammer has been riding. Look at the bottom of your hammer. There you’ll find a flat spot. Did you ever teeter-totter with a 12 inch plank across a railroad tie? It’s a rough ride. So take the pliers and kink the main spring just enough on the end so that you have a curved surface riding against the hammer. That’s part of your trouble cured already.

Next, you must take care of the little gremlin we mentioned before – the coil spring, which holds the ball bearing against the cylinder. With a wire cutter, remove one to one and a half coils from the back end of the spring. What’s next? Nothing. Put ‘er back together, friend. Now you’ve got an action that’s finer’n silk and just as smooth.

Smooth? Wait! There is something we’ve overlooked. What are we going to do about sharp edges on the hammer spur that keep chewing up your thumb? They need some smoothing! So – take a piece of medium one inch emery cloth. Cock the Hahn. Hold the barrel between your knees, and make like the Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy on that hammer spur. Problem solved. No muss, no fuss. And watch your fast draw time improve!

Here’s a link to Karen and Den featured on a Canadian TV show called “The Hour”.

Portraits of Canadians

]]> http://gunfightergulch.com/FastDraw/archives/91/feed 0 http://gunfightergulch.com/FastDraw/archives/9 http://gunfightergulch.com/FastDraw/archives/9#comments Sun, 01 Feb 2009 21:08:39 +0000 Papa G http://gunfightergulch.com/FastDraw/?p=9 Ergo Thumbing
By Jan Owen

This is to introduce you to the thumbing style I use; I suppose you could call it ergo-thumbing. It’s a little different than thumbing styles used by others. I developed it to minimize the amount of hand & arm movement during the draw, and to make the draw as compact as possible. If you read this and follow the instructions, you won’t end up thumbing just like me, because, for best results, you will need to tailor these moves to YOUR body.

I’m going to explain this draw in great detail. But you have to take this information and fashion it into YOUR thumbing style. Otherwise, it won’t be natural to you. And if it’s not natural, it won’t be as fast as it can be.

A lot of what goes on during the draw isn’t easy to see if you try to watch someone else. And they may not be able to tell you what they’re doing in words you can understand. I don’t know if I can, either, but we’re going to find out right now. What we’re about to embark upon, as far as I know, hasn’t been done before. Not at this level of detail.
Before we go any further, for this to be helpful, you will need appropriate equipment. A fast draw rig that’s suited to thumbing. Doesn’t have to be fancy. A Mernickle FD1, FD6, or FD7 will work, but you will have to bend the shank a little for best results with any of them. Most of Bob’s other rigs are more suited to slap cocking or fanning than thumbing. Any of Alfonso’s rigs (A1, A2, A3) can be used for thumbing, but again, you may need to reshape the shank to suit your style. The Andy Anderson rigs are good for thumbing pretty much as they come out of the box. So are a lot of the Ernie Hill rigs. If you don’t have one of these rigs, or something similar, it isn’t going to be as easy to thumb as it could be. You can thumb with other rigs, but these will help you more than most of the others. You don’t want to start out at a disadvantage, do you? More about holsters in a few minutes…

Next comes the guns. If you have a Colt clone, you can make do for a short time to get started, but you will need to upgrade soon, because clones will not survive long under the beating you will give them practicing Fast Draw. A real Colt would be better, but pretty expensive, and still somewhat fragile. I recommend a built-for-Fast Draw Old Model Ruger Blackhawk in .45 caliber. A Ruger, especially for a beginner, is probably the best, because it is the easiest to make reliable. And in .45, you can shoot all the events with that one gun. Whatever gun you chose, it should be tuned specifically for thumbing by a gunsmith who specializes in fast draw guns. These guns need very specialized work to make them function over and over again smoothly and reliably, and the average gunsmith has no clue how to do this work. I’m not going to go into the modifications necessary here. The whole idea around tuning is to allow the gun’s parts to work very hard, but to minimize the impact damage between the principal moving parts that fast draw imparts on these guns. You can do fast draw with an untuned gun, but you won’t do it for very long…

Now that you have the proper equipment, it’s time to get started on the draw. The first thing we’ll do is find the right stance for you. Then, we’ll decide what your proper hand & arm positions are. You’ll need to know instinctively precisely how to get yourself lined up at the firing line so you’ll hit the target every time. And then, the rig you’re going to use will have to be married to the hand/arm position, so we’ll probably end up altering the holster a little…

I really like the Ernie Hill 1999 model as a slap cocking rig. But out of the box, it isn’t a great thumbing rig. The Mernickle FD-6 is a little better for thumbing, but it’s not ideal out of the box, either. However, it does position the gun a little higher, and that’s helpful. The following modification is applicable for many different rigs like these to make them more suitable for thumbing.

The shank (the reinforced piece that attaches the holster to the belt) on many of these rigs often has a kink in it, angling out, then down to position the boot (holster) out and away from your body, and cants the butt well away from your body. This places the gun in a perfect, or nearly perfect position (depending on the shooter) for slap cocking, allowing plenty room to sweep the hammer with your off hand and let you to get maximum leverage into your draw.

But we’re not slap cocking. To make this rig usable for thumbing, you need to rebend the shank so that much of the dogleg is gone. Not all of it; the gun still needs to be away from the body so that no part of your body interferes with the draw, and far enough away to let you get a good set-up on the gun at “Shooter Set!” on the firing line.

Put on your rig and drop your gun in it. Rotate the whole rig until the boot is way out in front of you. That’s not where you’re going to shoot from; I just want the boot & gun completely out of the way for a minute.

NOW! Let your arms hang down at your sides completely limp and natural. Make no attempt to orient your hands or your forearms in any direction. We want your arms hanging TOTALLY naturally. Now, without making ANY compensating moves in your hand or forearm, I want you to simply raise the forearm of your shooting hand at the elbow until it is just a little short of level. Look closely at your forearm… You’ll note that your arm isn’t pointing straight ahead. It’s pointing partially across your body toward the left front, if you’re right handed. Without twisting your wrist in any direction, simply extend your index (trigger) finger. You’ll see that it’s pointing in exactly the same direction as your forearm.

Now, move the gun belt back around until the gun is exactly under your hand when your arm and hand are in that natural position with your forearm pointing toward the target. Now, move the belt around, and bend the shank as necessary until the gun butt lines up with your hand in that that alignment and is in perfect position to grasp it without moving your arm. Bend and/or twist the shank as necessary to position the gun in perfect alignment with your hand and arm, while keeping the gun butt canted away from your body far enough to allow you plenty room to grasp it without your body getting in the way. It should still be canted slightly outward, but quite a bit less than it came out of the box. The boot will now be angled across the top of your thigh, and pointed at an angle across in front of you and to your left, at the same angle your forearm points. If it isn’t, bend it some more until it is exactly lined up with your forearm in it’s natural position.

Now, it’s time to get in front of a mirror. Face the mirror directly, and again line your hand & arm up above your holstered gun, which should now be oriented along the same line your arm will point to naturally; across
your body. Now, using the gun’s butt as a pointer, slowly turn until the gun’s butt is pointing directly away from the mirror (in other words, it should be at a right angle with the mirror’s surface). Said still another way (because getting properly aligned with your target every time is critical), if the gun were lifted back out of the holster, and pivoted so
as to be level as the tip of the muzzle clears the top front of the holster, the bore would be looking exactly at right angles with the mirror’s surface, or the barrel would be looking directly into it’s own image. Once you’re oriented so that, when you draw the gun, it’s pointed exactly down the bore of it’s reflected image from that natural position,
look at your position in the mirror again, but with the gun back in the holster. You’ll see your body is facing to the right of straight ahead (if you’re right handed), and the gun in the holster is pointed downward at an angle at the floor, but is on a line that is directly toward the mirror. Draw a mental image of how you’re standing relative to the mirror, because you want to ALWAYS be in this same relative position when you line up on the target… At a shoot, there will be no mirror, so just look down at your holstered gun, and align the grip frame with the center of the target, and you will be ready to rock…

This next part will be easier for someone who already has some experience with fast draw, or who has seen the Cal Eilrich video “The Art of Fast Draw” (everyone should have this video, and should have watched it so many times you know the script by heart). I’m talking about understanding how to throw your hips forward and your shoulders back as you draw your gun.

What I want you to do is simply, in slow motion, move your hips forward and bring your shoulders back while curling the three fingers of your gunhand around the gunbutt, and grasp the gun as your hips & shoulders move. This action alone will put the gun in your hand, without your making any attempt to actually draw it out of the holster. If you positioned yourself so that the gun in the holster was oriented directly toward the mirror, and you lined your body up to position your nearly horizontal forearm in the same alignment, the gun will now be pointed exactly at the mirror. Later, you will position a target in place of the mirror. But right now you want to be able to SEE exactly what’s going on while you practice.

Now. If the gun isn’t exactly looking down it’s own bore, you need to reposition either the holster, your stance, or both, until when the gun comes level, it’s exactly on target. Keep on adjusting until it is. Every time. Once you’re lined up precisely, pay close attention to where your feet are pointed, because that’s exactly how you’re going to line up in front of the target on match day.

Now comes the coordination part. You can now sort of get the gun out of the holster and end up with it pointed in the right direction. While you’re practicing this, you need to turn partway around, and look to ensure you’re also bringing the barrel positively level and parallel with the floor. If you don’t get level, you’ll shoot low every time.

We haven’t talked about the hammer yet. That’s because you need to understand first how to get lined up and get your body into a natural position that it will return to EVERY time, if you practice this enough times. Once you’re in control of these body moves, it’s time to cock the gun.

Your hand position is already decided by the natural position exercise above, but we haven’t exactly oriented your hand in conjunction with the gun. I position my hand beside the holstered gun with the three fingers that will grasp the butt well separated from the trigger finger and close to the butt. The trigger finger is more or less pointing straight down at the floor (not parallel with the barrel), right alongside the boot, and right next to the trigger guard. The thumb is widely separated, and poised just slightly in front of, and partially above the hammer, with the thumb’s orientation nearly in the same plane as the hammer. The tip of the thumb is just toward the body rather than quite in the exact same plane as the hammer, so again, it makes for a fairly natural hand position, and still positions all the fingers where they need to be to start the draw.

So now, it’s time to cock the gun & draw it. Make a sweeping move with your thumb, drawing the joint of your thumb across the hammer spur, cocking the gun. The thumb should be moving the hammer back with the outmost joint of your thumb, which crosses the plane of the hammer, not at right angles, but more closely in alignment with the direction of rotation of the hammer. You don’t want the hammer spur either inside or outside of that joint. If you were to look at my right hand, you would find a callus exactly across that thumb joint, especially on the side that faces toward the rest of my fingers. That’s from over a million thumb draws.

So now we can now do the full move. Draw your thumb across the hammer as you throw your hips forward, and your shoulders come back, while at the same time getting your three fingers against the butt, grasping the gun as it pops out of the holster, and you achieve your grip and lock the gun level, while at the very same time, pulling the trigger. If you’ve done everything right, the gun will be looking exactly down it’s own bore as you hear the hammer hit the frame. You will have to make a fairly concerted effort to keep the gun vertical while doing this in keeping with WFDA rules. In these rules you will have to concentrate on pushing the butt down just a little to bring the gun’s barrel all the way level as you fire. The twisting move is actually simpler in this regard.

Chances are, it won’t be perfect the first few times, but that IS the move. What you want to do now is do it a few hundred thousand more times until everything I’ve described DOES really happen as described AUTOMATICALLY. And YOU are who will have adjust to make all this happen right. That’s one I can’t do. Do it in front of the mirror. The mirror is your friend. Practice your draw a huge number of times. And keep adjusting just a little bit until you can see that you are exactly on target every time the hammer hits. When you start beating that guy in the mirror, you’ll know you’re really fast! Then it will be time to graduate to targets…

When you get really good at this, you may decide you want to try an Open match. My Twisting Thumb move is very nearly the same as the move above. The ONLY real difference is that it’s actually an even more natural move to let the gun roll onto it’s right side with just the slightest twist of your wrist as your hips & shoulders are moving, you’re cocking the gun, it’s coming out of the boot & coming level, and you’re pulling the trigger. It’ll fire almost fully on it’s right side, and your time will actually improve a little at the same time.

Voila!!! Two new moves in the same day! Actually, it has taken me about forty years to get this good, and I just keep practicing. As I get older, my reaction time slows a little, and I have to get craftier. That’s why these moves have you shooting directly over the boot precisely as the barrel clears the front of the boot & is level. Any more movement is just time lost!

And now, after only forty years, I decided to try slap cocking. I’m only about three years along in THAT learning curve, as you get started thumbing.

That twisting thumb move can be just about as fast as a slap cock, with the primary advantage going to the faster lock time of a shorter stroke tight coil spring action, with fractionally smaller hammer. Assuming you use a Ruger, you may be able to pick up another few thousandths there.

Well, that’s about it for my part. Now it’s up to you. Using what you’ve learned, all that is between you and being a competitive shooter is practice. A LOT of practice. And more practice.

Then buy a good timer, and some targets, and practice some more! The key to becoming really good, is to learn the fundamentals, and then practice. Practice until everything becomes completely automatic. You’ll always be practicing, but at whatever time you feel comfortable, you should begin to enter contests. It is here that you will begin to really learn how well your are progressing. And it is here that you will confirm for yourself just how much fun this can be!!!